This disclosure relates in general to centrifugal compressors, and in particular to a performance adjustment system for a centrifugal compressor.
Conventional multi-stage centrifugal compressors are typically designed to provide the best possible performance at a ‘design’ operating condition, which may be, for example, a most common operating condition, an operating condition provided to design the compressor, and/or a variety of other design operating conditions known in the art. However, users of the compressor may require that the compressor provide optimized performance at an ‘off-design’ operating condition that is different from the design operating condition. In order to obtain such performance for off-design operating conditions, the user may be required to make adjustments in the various stationary components of compressors (e.g., the inlet guide vanes, the diffuser vanes, the return channel vanes, etc.). For example, changes in the vane setting angles may be implemented to investigate the compressors response to such changes in order to try to improve the overall performance of the compressor. In such cases, the compressor must be disassembled, new internal components may need to be fabricated to replace the original components, and/or various manual adjustments to the components may need to be made. Thus, the process of adjusting compressor performance for different operating conditions is very time-consuming and expensive.
Therefore, what is needed is an improved compressor performance adjustment system.